UIS 1 Grydehoj PublicSpace

Making Ground, Losing Space: Land
Reclamation and Urban Public Space in

Island Cities
Adam Grydehj
Island Dynamics, Denmark
Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
agrydehoj@islanddynamics.org
Abstract: This article foregrounds urban public space by considering land reclamation in
island cities. Land reclamation is nearly ubiquitous in the urban development of coastal cities,
and island cities in particular are subject to exceptionally dense urbanisation and thus
exceptionally strong conflict over urban space. Drawing upon theories at the intersection of
the land and the sea (liquid, archipelago, and aquapelago spatiality), we analyse socially
problematic aspects of the creation of new urban space through land reclamation. Land
reclamation occurs in island cities such as Bahrain, Copenhagen, Dubai, Hong Kong, Macau,
New York City, and Xiamen in order to construct space for urban industrial, residential, and
leisure functions while avoiding the social conflict that often accompanies urban renewal
efforts. However, whether in the case of publically accessible leisure parks or secessionary
island enclaves for the ultra-rich, land reclamation processes serve powerful societal forces
and represent the capture of urban space for elite interests. This reduces the prospects for
urban public space and limits the horizons for the development of more socially just future
cities. The transformation of unclaimed fluid space into solid private space is a relative form
of accumulation by dispossession, even if the public has never been aware of what it possessed.
Keywords: Accumulation by dispossession; island cities; land reclamation; public space;

urban development; urban space
2015 Adam Grydehj
Island Dynamics, Denmark - http://www.urbanislandstudies.org
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Grydehj, A. (2015) Making Ground, Losing Space: Land Reclamation and Urban Public Space in Island
Cities, Urban Island Studies, 1, 96-117.
Urban Island Studies 97
Making Ground, Losing Space: Land Reclamation and Urban Public

Space in Island Cities
1. Theorising between land and sea

This paper explores economic and political drivers of coastal land reclamation as well as land
reclamations impact on urban public space. Focusing on land reclamation in island cities,
which tend to be sites of exceptional urban density and thus exceptional spatial competition,
I theorise the nature of public space at the intersection of the land and the sea. I ultimately regard
land reclamation as a sociopolitical process that entrenches existing power structures while
circumventing potentially productive social conflict over the use of urban space. Urban land
reclamation functions as accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003) by transforming
a fluid and abstract resource for future public good into a solid and static elite private asset.
Noting the self-imposed terrestrial limitations of much geographical scholarship, Steinberg

and Peters (2015: 250) propose a wet ontology that problematises accepted notions of
time, space, mobility, and materiality. By realising space in terms of the horizontal and the
vertical, in the manner of Elden (2013), one achieves an oceanic notion of a dynamic,
voluminous materiality in which the form of water opens new territories of control and
conflict (Steinberg & Peters, 2015: 252). For Steinberg and Peters (2015: 256), the point of
departure for for thinking with water [is] the concept of the dynamic assemblage, in which
mobile human and nonhuman (including molecular) elements and affects are not merely
passively consumed but imagined, encountered, and produced. Ultimately:
Attentiveness to the sea as a space of politics can upend received understandings of
political possibilities and limitations. The ocean [] through its material reformation,
mobile churning, and nonlinear temporality creates the need for new understandings
of mapping and representing; living and knowing; governing and resisting. Like the
ocean itself, maritime subjects and objects can move across, fold into, and emerge out
of water in unrecognised and unanticipated ways (Steinberg & Peters, 2015: 260-261).
This thinking with water approach echoes Pughs aspiration for thinking with the
archipelago: The Caribbean archipelago is a movement that refuses to concede to history.
It is a place of Adamic renewal against tragic overdetermination. Its Middle Passage is one
of metamorphosis (Pugh, 2013: 18). As spaces of movement, both the ocean and the
archipelago defy static, linear history, which justifies and explains and expatiates (Walcott,
1998: 64; qtd. in Pugh, 2013: 18).
Hayward (2015: 84) grapples directly with this intersection of land and sea through his concept
of the aquapelago, referring to the integrated marine and terrestrial assemblages generated
by human habitation and activity. Such aquapelagic assemblages are performed entities that
come into being and wax and wane as climate patterns alter and as human socio-economic
organisations, technologies, and/or the resources and trade systems they rely on, change and
develop (Hayward, 2012: 27). They necessarily involve humans interacting with other actants,
which may be animate (living) entities, inanimate ones (such as sand, soil, etc.) or the product
of energies (such as individual weather events or larger climatic patterns, such as global warming)
(Hayward, 2015: 84). Inspired by Hayward, Suwa (2012: 14) sees land and water [] merging
to emerge as a whole, with islands not being groups of isolates but rather assemblages
concentrated by the waters. Indeed, an island is less a piece of land surrounded by water
than an intense and enduring relationship between land and water (Stratford et al., 2011: 115).
Similarly, writing of the archipelago in urban design, Casper (2013: 109) argues that the
collected urban nodes and their suspension in a secondary context of parks, plazas, and
open space constitute the core elements of archipelago urbanism:
To design a city at its interfaces focuses design energy where it is most potent as urban
facades, as gateways, as divisions, as icons. For islands, the zone where water meets
ground becomes critical then to the reading of the archipelago as such and to the
structure of the networks pieces, both aquatic and land-based. [...] The edge becomes
the place where negotiations of publicity and privacy, form and program, and image
and experience are manifested.
From this perspective, land and sea are coproduced, and the urban/island whole is narrated,
negotiated, and experienced on its edges.
Such aquatic, archipelagic, and aquapelagic approaches with their emphases on dynamism,
metamorphosis, and socially informed spatiality may be particularly relevant for considering
the politics of transformation from water to land, from land to water. We can see, for example,
how the actual or predicted loss of land to the sea due to climate change has been politicised
in ways that emphasise not those most at risk but instead those most iconically or symbolically
at risk, namely small island states even in instances when such states face more immediate
challenges and when communities elsewhere will potentially be more disastrously affected
(Baldacchino & Kelman, 2014). The explanation may in part be that an absolute lack of land
places terrestrial space at a premium in states like Tuvalu and the Tokelau, regardless of the
actual level of threat. But the explanation may in part also be that islands provide so
comprehensive an interface between land and water that they represent convenient and
readable (Baldacchino, 2006: 9) contexts for understanding social and political (rather
than just environmental) fluidity. Changes in coastlines and the tug of war between the
terrestrial and the marine whether the manufacturing of land in place of the sea, the
destruction of land by rising seas, or the dredging of sand from the seabed in order to create
new land elsewhere are thus ripe for nuanced analyses that appreciate the full scope of fluid
politics, spaces, and histories.
Land reclamation, the empirical focus of this paper, epitomises the importance of recognising
flux and transformation. Reclamation, the most commonly used English-language term for
the construction of ground where water once had been, is in a sense singularly inappropriate:
Land reclamation does not typically seek to reclaim lost ground at all but instead to extend
solid ground out into new frontiers. Marine spaces often provided the initial rationale for
founding human habitations and livelihoods in coastal zones. As a result, terrestrialisation
projects which inevitably alter the nature of adjacent marine spaces, ecosystems, and
un-reclaimed shorelines as well as drive subsequent adaptation processes are far from the
straightforward triumphs of material fixity that they first appear or that the reclamation
discourse suggests. Flux always begets flux, and the human impetus to construct fixed
histories and solid spaces can mask the true consequences of transformative processes.
2. Land reclamation in island cities

Despite its prominence in coastal cities and despite the lively debate on urban public space
in general, land reclamation is rarely subject to social science urban development inquiries,
and its special implications for public space are rarely discussed. Instead, land reclamation
is usually treated as a phase in a specific development project, as a by-product of a particular
citys historical trajectory, or as a technical solution (or obstacle) to solving a specific social
or environmental problem. Occasionally, researchers analyse land reclamation from a broader
perspective, but even here, focus is typically limited to one or a few particular cities (e.g. Lima,
2011; Ng, 2010). Even Hudsons landmark study of land reclamation (Hudson, 1996),
thoroughly international in scope and extending from historical motivations to legal
developments, devotes little attention to its present-day social and political impacts.
This lack of research is unfortunate, for land reclamation turns out to be near-ubiquitous in
the development of coastal cities. I focus here on cities based on islands or archipelagos,
where urban space is especially restricted and where the motivations for and impacts of
creating new ground are especially pronounced. Although it has only recently been recognised
within the scholarly community, islands are strongly associated with urbanisation: A mix of
territorial benefits, defence benefits, and trade benefits have historically made small islands
ideal sites for basing either seats of government or trading posts (Grydehj, 2015).
One reason why the tendency for major cities to be based on small islands has been overlooked
is that the use of land reclamation to extend urban space is extremely old: Because former
islands have been connected to the mainland through land reclamation, we often fail to recognise
island cities for what they are (Grydehj et al., 2015). Examples abound, including Dubrovnik,
Manila, Mexico City, Tyre, and the former almost-island of Boston. Yet there are still many
major island cities that have expanded significantly through land reclamation but around
which the waters have not completely receded, such as Abidjan, Amsterdam, Lagos, St Petersburg,
Singapore, Stockholm, and Venice. Even here, however, close proximity (whether anthropogenic
or otherwise) to the mainland means that the citys island status is frequently missed, and
its coastlines blur from view, though not necessarily from significance: Even if it goes
unnoticed, island spatiality may have major impacts on urbanisation patterns (Steyn, 2015).
The tendency to define islands by their coastlines (Baldacchino, 2005) is no mere quirk of
the human imagination. The meeting of land and water minimising distances between
production and transport, import and consumption is frequently what brought island cities
to prominence to begin with. If a places status as an aquapelagic assemblage (Hayward,
2012) is to be sustained, then the living, social connection between land and water must be
maintained. Yet the things we do with our coastlines change, and economic circumstances
may argue for the creation of new coastlines to serve new uses for new users.
The Copenhagen archipelago is an instructive case. Copenhagens castle island, Slotsholmen,

is now nestled in the city centre but was once located considerably offshore. Slotsholmens
12th Century re-engineering and fortification were performed in the service of the citys
dominant political force: The island both protected the harbour from incursion and provided
a seat from which political power was projected into the city itself. Changing economies and
changing forms of political control, however, meant that a distant, exclusive castle island was
no longer the ideal seat of power. New phases of urban development instead privileged the
citys commercial, industrial, and administrative functions. Over the course of the 16th and
17th Centuries, land reclamation projects saw the city rush out to meet Slotsholmen from the
west and encapsulate it in a crescent of artificial islands to the east. Much of this reclaimed
land is now open to and used by the public, though its heavily managed nature (cf. Carmona,
2010) to some degree limits the potential for grassroots development in the use of space.
Figure 1: Map of Copenhagen, mid-19th Century. Source:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copenhagen_circa_1850.jpg
Over the centuries, Copenhagens growth continued. Todays capitalist urbanism grants value
to empty coastlines: Yesterdays coasts hold less value than tomorrows. Thus, even in island
cities, which are intrinsically blessed with extensive coastlines, new waterfront property is
manufactured in front of old waterfront property. Since property values are frequently highest
near the city centre, maritime industries are pushed ever farther from the urban core (Daamen
& Vries, 2013), sometimes occasioning successive waves of land reclamation and urban
renewal. The seeping away of industry from Copenhagens reclaimed Sydhavn (South
Harbour) in the 1990s opened the area to residential and business development in the 2000s,
resulting in ever-expanding Amsterdam-style archipelagos of artificial islands separated by
canals (Heggland, 2014). Once developers have reaped the profits from selling residences
with an attractive view, they are incentivised to create even more property, regardless of how
this affects users and residents of the existing new coastline. Low-value industrial actors,
meanwhile, are kept constantly on the move: In the mid-1990s, industrial redevelopment
pushed the old fishing harbour in inner Nordhavn (North Harbour) out to the extremity of
this artificial peninsula. Nevertheless, grand plans for Nordhavn as one of Copenhagens new
business and residential centres may see the fishing harbour either displaced entirely or be
granted a token continued existence encircled by new development, as has occurred with the
fishing harbour in Sydhavn (Rubow, 2014). As the existing Nordhavn is being filled, the
peninsula is also being expanded by a third (1 km) using earth excavated for the new Metro
rail line (By & Havn, n.d.). Subterranean rail transport thus literally provides the grounds
for new high-value business, residential, and industrial life: Major infrastructural projects
can be mutually justifying, requiring ever-more extensive urban interventions.
Island cities have led the way in these processes. New York City accrued complete new
shorelines during its 18th- and 19th-Century booms. Manhattan, which had grown to
prominence in large part due to its estuarine environment and the booming oyster industry,
turned in on itself and lost its marine orientation as the overexploited oyster industry failed
and as the shoreline was engineered for new purposes: The city became enclosed, de-
aquapelagised, centred on a park instead of the sea (Hayward, 2015: 86), the mirror image
of Austrias residentially enclosed artificial lakes described by Andexlinger (2015).
Manhattans experience has recently been mirrored on the Chinese island of Xiamen, the land
area of which has grown alongside its surging port and manufacturing economy. An important
port city for trade with the West since the mid-16th Century, Xiamens population has undergone
a recent explosion, rising from 639,000 in 1990 to 2,207,000 in 2010 (UN-Habitat, 2013).
Over the past two decades, urbanisation has overtaken the old forests and farms, and land
reclamation has simplified the islands coastline into a more perfectly circular shape (Hua et
al., 2010). Like Manhattan, Xiamen has turned away from the sea, as is strikingly exemplified
by the case of Yundang Lake: This former harbour (10 km) was enclosed by a sea wall and land
reclamation, transforming the bay into a heavily polluted lake system. In 1988, however, the
government initiated an expensive integrated treatment project aimed at Yundangs restoration
and rehabilitation. The project is in the process of re-transforming this body of water into
an urban leisure, business, and tourism zone (1.7 km) (Ye et al., 2014), and the lake has become
Xiamens money magnet, a site of intensive gentrification (Tsai & Chiang, 2014: 73).
Yet Xiamens transformation has been nothing compared with some other Asian island cities.
Nearly 250 km of Tokyo have been constructed through an ambitious series of drainage and
land reclamation projects, primarily since the 1950s. Even ancient Tokyo (formerly Edo,
i.e. estuary) had been subject to politically motivated wetland reclamation activities, and the
citys historical core is composed of numerous interconnected islands. In the 1960s and 1970s,
the Japanese government supported sometimes in the absence of compelling demand
the construction of industrially focused yet mixed-use islands offshore cities like Tokyo,
Osaka, and Kobe. These urban islands, designed to optimise port function efficiency while
providing residential and recreational space, profoundly influenced wider Japanese urban
planning and architectural philosophy (Pernice, 2007; Shiozaki & Malone, 1996).
The world hub for land reclamation is, however, Chinas Pearl River Delta. The ancient island
port city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) encouraged the urbanisation and expansion
of numerous islands farther downstream in the delta. Although no longer popularly associated
with islands, the Pearl River Deltas archipelagic nature was evident to observers well into
the 20th Century (see Figure 2 below). In 1557, the island of Macau (and later the islands of Coloane
and Taipa) came under Portuguese control, only returning to China as a Special Administrative
Region in 1999. The Portuguese expanded their territory through land reclamation, which
has increased Macaus land area from 10.28 km in the late-19th Century to 15.5 km in 1984
to 31.3 km today (Yu, 2008). With a population of around 631,000, Macau is the most
densely populated territory in the world. It is also the worlds most profitable gambling
destination, with casino tourism centred on the so-called Cotai Strip of reclaimed land
connecting Coloane and Taipa (Simpson, 2014). Macaus form and function have developed
side-by-side, with changes in the city-states economy and industrial composition prompting
changes to its urban fabric (Feng et al., 2012; Tieben, 2009). The tightly clustered residences,
temples, and small businesses of old Macau (much of it itself reclaimed centuries ago) contrast
markedly with the towering casinos and purpose-built leisure districts that have risen up on
Macaus new land. Remarkably, even in this tiniest of territories, Macaus newest land is only
problematically accessible by foot, cut off from old Macau by transport infrastructure
designed for the taxi and tourist coach. An economy that seeks to shield tourists from
distraction from lucrative gambling and high-end shopping expenditure (with the grudging
addition of spatially limited value-added heritage tourism zones) has succeeded in turning
Macau away from the sea: Access to and interest in the waterfront is highly restricted.
In Hong Kong, on the opposite side of the Pearl River Delta, density imposed by island
spatiality likewise incentivises land reclamation. The location of the original British
settlement was selected in 1841 due to its suitability for land reclamation (Hudson, 1996:
51-52). The territorys core Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon peninsula continue to
expand, yet so too do Hong Kongs outlying islands. On the island of Lantau, the upmarket
Discovery Bay residential district and Hong Kong Disney Resort have been built on reclaimed
land: In todays capitalist urbanism, the coast is a place where both dreams and land come
true assuming one can afford them.
Figure 2: Entrance to the Pearl River, on the Way to Canton by Baron von Reichenau, 1940.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pearl_River_Entrance_1940.jpg
Some artificial island ground such as port and industrial zones is hardly open to the public
at all. In other cases, however, as with the residential islands of Copenhagen and the leisure
areas around Xiamens Yundang Lake, residents and users of artificial island spaces literally
buy into an illusion of public space. This is an illusion precisely because the use and prospects
of these spaces are conditional upon the desires of the state and corporate actors that enabled
and undertook the creation of the space even when the processes that served to territorialise
unclaimed space have been undertaken in the name of the public good. Even in ancient cities,
newly manufactured ground has been privatised or enclosed from conception, resistant to
public repurposing or appeal.
Land reclamation is today popularly associated with a particular kind of economic activity,
namely the manufacturing of island paradises by property developers. The idea of the
paradisical island city is nothing new, and the dream of the island as a perfect space secluded
from danger yet well-placed for the projection of influence into the wider world is both
ancient and widespread (Pigou-Dennis & Grydehj, 2014a; Baldacchino, 2008). Todays
paradise islands are being manufactured on vast scales. These ideal islands may still be
dreamed into being by visionaries, yet they are constructed primarily for the sake of paying
residents and businesses: The creation of ground is an economic end in itself.
The artificial islands of Miami Beach date back to the early 1900s, yet land reclamation destined
for high-end residences has entered a new phase in the past few decades. Such land reclamation
is perhaps most striking in the Gulf state of Dubai, where the creation of new land has
assumed fetishistic proportions. Despite the regions considerable land availability, there has
been a rush to engineer a series of artificial islands (including the Palm Islands, the World,
the Universe, and the Waterfront projects) designed to maximise both real estate value and
iconic impact from the serenely distant gaze of Google Earth (Hewitt & Graham, 2015).
Dubai may have become obsessed with urban gigantism (Gupta, 2015), but it is not alone.
Around the globe, iconic skyscrapers and iconic artificial islands are presented as hallmarks
of world city status yet are simultaneously associated with privatism, exclusion, and
hyper-inequality. Indeed, in the most comprehensively designed of such secessionary
networked spaces (Graham & Marvin, 2001), manufactured islands and monumental towers
often coincide, with Dubais Burj Al Arab and Atlantis hotels, the casinos of Macaus Cotai,
and Singapores Marina Bay being just a few spectacular examples. The combination of
reclaimed land and monumental architecture is partly practical, for island-conditioned urban
densification is a driver of both land reclamation and vertical urbanism. This is a form of
voluminous, three-dimensional space, but it is also an attempt to lay claim to and render
static that which once was fluid. Such island city paradises are strongly symbolic, branded
from birth, the grotesque epitome of what Pugh (2013: 18) decries as overdetermination.
Despite attempts at universal iconicism, most such island paradises have been designed as
residential or holiday enclaves and are grounded in a deeply troubling social exclusivity:
Wealth is the determinant of admittance, services are provided by immigrant labourers, and
everything from roads to elevators to labour camps serves to maintain the separation
and segregation of welcome from unwelcome guests (Selke, 2010).
Unlike Dubai, Bahrain does not even lack coastline per se, but this Gulf island state has
acquired around 70 km of new ground, the vast majority since 1965 and most in the past
decade. This stupendous reshaping of the Bahrain archipelago is rooted in a desire not only
to proliferate valuable land with sea views but to do so in already densely built-up areas (cf.
Hudson, 1996): The ideal island is simultaneously an oasis of exclusivity and well-placed for
deriving urban proximity benefits. That is, even when (potentially egalitarian) sprawl is
possible, extraordinarily expensive and socially suspect processes of land reclamation may
be preferred precisely because there is more profit to be made in exclusivity than in inclusivity.
Bahrain possesses a Dubai-style fantasy land, Durrat Al Bahrain, yet more significantly, its
northern cities have extended tentacles out into the Gulf. The public has been displaced as
Bahrains ancient fishing and agricultural industries have ceded terrain, both old and new,
to the seafront real-estate market to the residential, finance, and shipping functions that
cannibalise their own enormity and subsist off the ever-more fragile illusion of infinite
wealth-creating processes. Despite the immense expansion of its shoreline, only 3%-8% of
Bahrains coast is publically accessible (Al Ansari, 2009: 2). Nothing is so emblematic of the
transformed value of island land as the case of Jiddah. This small island off of Bahrains
northwest coast was formerly the site of a prison, but the prisoners have been cleared away
to make space for a palace and leisure complex belonging to the prime minister (Saleh, 2013).
And here, a short distance offshore from Jiddahs palace, a tiny new archipelago has been
constructed in the shape of Bahrain itself.
The combination of incredible wealth and incredible density in Singapore, meanwhile, has
encouraged the construction of a cross-border paradise. Batam Island in Indonesias Riau
Archipelago has long since industrialised and undergone economic integration with Singapore
across the water (Kumar & Siddique, 2013), but those desirous of urban proximity and (the
illusion of) paradisical nature need look no further than the Funtasy Island resort lying between
the two archipelagos. Although billed as the worlds largest eco-resort (Defterios, 2014),
these previously pristine islands (3.28 km) have undergone massive earthworks and extensions
into the sea, and Funtasy Island will soon host thousands of residential and tourism housing
units, not to mention entertainment and leisure zones (Funtasy Island, 2014).
As this section has shown, land reclamation is a significant process in urban development both
past and present. I have highlighted some troubling aspects of land reclamation in island cities
above, but next I will consider the phenomenon in relation to urban public space in particular.
3. Grounding public space

As the number and percentage of urban-dwellers grows worldwide, the issue of urban public
space increases in importance. Carmona (2010) notes that there is nothing new in the idea
that public space is precarious and that either over-management or under-management of
public space is leading to its decline or possibly even its end (e.g. Sorkin, 1992). Although
it is commonly asserted that public space is under threat (Low & Smith, 2006), Paddison and
Sharp (2007: 88-89) argue that research emphasis on iconic projects and spectacular
examples of urban transformation at the city scale risks overlooking local spaces of social
interaction. Such a focus could indeed lead well-intentioned researchers to inadvertently
read the city out of the prayer book of corporate and state interests, for if the true heart of
the city is the showcase central plaza, monumental skyscraper, or glittering shopping centre,
then ordinary community members have already lost the battle to define public space. We
must bear this warning in mind when considering land reclamation, for even if the facilities
constructed on new ground are relatively banal, the land reclamation process is by nature
elite. Our argument here is not that elite urban development is the only kind of development
that matters but rather that it is problematic when entire (seaward) scopes, directions, and
horizons for urban development are accessible only to elite actors.
That said, it is also important to note that different sections of society possess different
conceptions of public space: There is a difference between highly regulated open space on
the one hand and political public spaces for civic engagement and interaction among people
from all levels of society on the other (Mitchell, 1995), and one must beware of creating a
stark public/private binary when the reality is much more complex (Madden, 2010). Clashes
over access to space frequently take the form of conflicting conceptualisations of the public.
In addition, changing societies may reduce the extent to which urban public space is a site
of political formation and human recognition, even if it remains an important site of civic
becoming (Amin, 2008: 22).
Although public space is conceptually problematic, it can nevertheless prove a worthwhile

lens for considering developments in urban space. I attempt here to reflect value upon public
space by considering its antithesis: space that was never public, that is private by design. The
fact that public space activism is particularly visible as a reaction to urban renewal initiatives
(where there is concern that corporate and state actors are seeking to enclose previously
public space) should make us wary of instances in which these same powerful actors are able
to capture space without raising the hackles of defenders of public access and ownership.
Land has historically been a determinant of power and possesses a political-economic

aspect: It is both the site and stake of struggle since it is a scarce resource that cannot be
created (Elden, 2010: 806). Or rather, there is a societal presumption that land cannot be
created even though, in actuality, there has scarcely been a time in human history when new
land has not been created (Hudson, 1996). For Gaffikin, McEldowney, and Sterrett (2010:
494), because cities are subject to limited spatial scope for development, whether through
natural topography and/or statutory designation of settlement patterns, [] all cities are
contested in the sense that such containment generates intrinsic dispute about how to use
and allocate scarce ground resources. In highly dense cities in which spatial scope is
exceptionally constrained (such as island cities, bounded by water), we might expect such
contestation to be exceptionally heated. The values of both public and private space will
increase relative to their overall availability. I argue that the openness or publicness of
such contestation is vital to the just development of the city. It is when conflicts over resources
are not resolved but simply submerged and when spatial privilege becomes a fait accomplis
that urban society is prevented not merely from progressing but also from striving toward
progress.
Land reclamation has become a favoured strategy for coastal and island city development in
part because it is a means by which elite actors can create new urban spaces while bypassing
many of the tensions and contestations that result from attempting to claim a portion of the
existing urban space for new purposes. Since reclaimed land quite concretely represents a
blank slate for development, it could be deemed immune from claims of publicness. Yet such
an analysis is not politically neutral: To deem reclaimed land a solid blank slate is to deny its
previous fluid spatiality.
4. The capture of unclaimed space

Water physically and symbolically both connects islands to and separates them from other
places (Picornell, 2014). Small island societies frequently use this state of in-betweenness to
their economic and political advantage (Baldacchino, 2010), and the precise dynamics of
separation and connectedness occasioned by different patterns of land-water spatiality can
profoundly affect island urbanisation processes (Pons et al., 2014; McElroy & Lucas, 2014;
Grydehj & Hayward, 2014). Furthermore, as White (2013: 83) notes:
In any collection of islands, it is the oceanic body and the space between islands that
often determines the sense of what is or is not included in an archipelagic collection. It
is the sea that determines boundaries and collectives. The sea as a continuous self-
similar surface between differentiated land bodies is essential to the identity of the
collection of islands, as well as each island itself.
The island or coastal city is not just land; it is also water. The interface between land and
water is crucial to islandness and archipelagicity, to the identification of space. If this edge
becomes the place where negotiations of publicity and privacy, form and program, and image
and experience are manifested (Casper, 2013: 109), then it is a matter of great import which
societal actors are capable of claiming and shaping this urban edge.
There is a tension inherent in how island spatiality prompts both urbanisation and land scarcity,
resulting in extreme urban densification. These processes are compounded as agglomeration
economies favour the spatially dense networks of industry, infrastructure, and knowledge
that tend to arise in island cities in particular (Grydehj, 2015: 433). This increases land value
and hence the demand for manufacturing ground where water once had been. Land reclamation
can thus seem to be an inevitability: As island cities grow in population and economic and
political importance, they grow out into the water too. Mainland cities also expand in size,
but the ease of urbanising adjacent land relative to urbanising adjacent water means that
island cities tend to exhibit distinctive patterns of expansion. Insofar as the city remains
substantially restricted to the island or the archipelago, land scarcity mitigates against sprawl,
favouring instead piecemeal accretions to the existing urban fabric or the decisive
establishment of dense satellite cities on nearby land masses. As we have seen, however, cities
that are usually considered merely coastal are also frequently insular, with major port cities
around the world developing in a manner that is influenced by their island status.
Given the complex effects of island spatiality and the ways in which land and water are
foregrounded in island spaces, the creating of new ground is of existential significance for
island cities. Land reclamation is associated with a number of interrelated factors on the city
scale, such as population growth, policy choice, traffic congestion, waste dumping, economic
orientation, industrial change, and lack of hinterlands or adjacent land into which the city
can expand (Chen, 2009; de Lange, 2014; Hudson, 1996; Li et al., 2011; Lima, 2011; Ng, 2010).
Yet regardless of the precise motivation for creating ground, land reclamation processes
reflect reigning power structures and competing societal interests. Coastal and island cities
may by nature demand land, yet demand itself is not enough: New ground cannot be created in
the absence of pre-existing economic resources or a supply of labour capable of producing it.
Both the weak and the powerful may benefit from acquiring additional urban space, but since
it is the powerful who can best afford or achieve reclamation projects, there is a tendency for
new ground to reflect the motivations and ideals of the dominant societal forces. Thus, for
example, we have seen Bahrains artisanal fishing cultures destroyed by needless land
reclamation (where sprawl would have sufficed). We have seen Manhattan turn its back on
marine industries. We have seen Copenhagen surrender to the vicious logic of technological
successionism, with each land reclamation project necessitating the next. We have seen
corporate and state interests first enclose and ruin and then claim and financialise the waters
of Xiamen. We have seen Indonesian archipelagic nature zones urbanised in the name of
ecology. Again and again, we have seen land reclamation favour the strong. Though socially
exclusive paradise islands may be more grossly offensive in an immediate sense, there
remains an element of social regressiveness in the creation of new ground for industrial and
semi-public leisure purposes as well.
Urban sprawl is not a process that inherently favours the elite. In some circumstances, such
as the formations of favelas and other kinds of informal settlements on the outskirts of cities,
urban sprawl can be a means however imperfect of facilitating social mixing and social
mobility, of bringing the periphery nearer to the centre. In contrast, coastal land reclamation
nearly always favours societal elites inasmuch as the technologies of modern-day land
reclamation (dredging/pumping, transport, and construction equipment as well as human
labour) are prohibitively expensive for all but the most resource-rich individuals and
institutions. If island cities play such a major role in global politics and economy, it is a matter
of concern that they seem to be particularly prone to and indeed, dependent on a socially
problematic variety of development.
Given the time-consuming and expensive nature of the land reclamation process, the amount
of new urban space produced at any one time is relatively small, even in the case of land
reclamation megaprojects. Cumulative and successive reclamation of small pieces of land
along the coast often disrupts the urban fabric since existing infrastructures (transport
arteries, sewers, schools) were not designed with the reclaimed land in mind hence the
inefficient networks of parallel and disjointed roadways in Hong Kong and Macau (Ng, 2012;
Feng et al., 2012), the lag between residential island construction and services provision in
Copenhagens Sydhavn, and the unintegrated drainage systems beneath Belize City (Pigou-
Dennis & Grydehj, 2014). Moreover, the construction of new urban space affects life in old
urban space: The manufacture of new waterfront property can capture the coastline for elite
interests, dispossessing existing users, as in the massive reimagining of Bahrains Muharraq
Island (Saleh, 2013), the creation of Manhattans Battery Park City (Shkuda, 2013), and
upwardly mobile Mumbai residents quest for a sea view (Swaminathan, 2014). Even when
the public is not physically denied access, there may be symbolic impediments to exercising
access to the waterfront alongside such elite developments (Al Ansari, 2009: 47).
Problematic though piecemeal accretions to the urban fabric may be, the reclamation of land
for satellite cities on new or existing islands likewise presents difficulties. In terms of
integration into the urban infrastructure network, the decision to create an entirely new urban
area separated from the centre by mountains or sea can spark an endless cycle of self-
justifying infrastructural complexification (Grydehj, 2014). Furthermore, the ability to
imagine new cities into being can privilege overly functionalist and overly deterministic
approaches that seek to insert future residents and workers into predetermined systems of
efficient working and living (Pernice, 2007). Even worse is the conscious construction of
secessionary island enclaves that seek to permanently shield power from its social
consequences, as in the cases of island paradises that are open only to the highest bidders.
Precisely because it is so costly and time-consuming to manufacture ground, land reclamation

rarely serves to de-densify the existing city: It instead simply provides new land for densification
on the terms of whichever societal actors have created the new ground. Such new land is
by definition not public space, even if it happens to be government owned. The same could
be said, of course, regarding any piece of land inasmuch as public access is dependent on the
will of the government and/or landowner. The difference in the case of reclaimed land is that,
within our reigning societal conceptualisations of territory and ownership, the public lacks
moral or historical grounds on which to stake a claim. Land reclaimed within the past decades
has been capitalised since conception. It has never been public. As Al Ansari (2009) notes,
whereas there has been a general trend over the past decades toward the creation of
waterfront public space in coastal cities, this trend has applied less frequently to cities with
histories of extensive and continual land reclamation. This could suggest that historical land
reclamation empirically limits present-day claims to a public waterfront.
This represents a wicked twist on Harveys accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003).

A citys coastal waters may not be widely used for civic purposes and are thus difficult to
define as public space, yet inasmuch as they are not a form of private space, they may be the
next best thing: space that might one day be public. Urban sea space is a space within which
future cities perhaps more egalitarian, more open, more free may emerge. Whenever
such space is claimed by the interests of enclosure, it is a qualitative and relative loss for
advocates of a more public city.
Although the corporate creation of new urban space for development may be superficially
superior to the violent renewal of existing urban space, it also involves a dangerous avoidance
of conflict: Locally controversial urban renewal projects sow seeds for protest, for activist
involvement, for the emergence of democratising social movements. In comparison, the
terrestrialisation of marine territory though frequently controversial and with deleterious
effects on adjacent communities serves to disenfranchise and make ambiguous non-elite
stakeholders, precisely because, as Steinberg and Peters (2015) observe, we lack the conceptual
tools for dealing with conflicts over liquid, voluminous space. By the time this space ceases
to be liquid and has solidified into territory, it is too late for contestation. Land reclamation
which renders private and makes static a fluid realm that has hitherto resisted history
can never serve anyone but its masters. The urban edge the land-sea interface is at once
the most profound urban space and that which is least defended by arguments of publicness.
5. Conclusion
This paper has considered the creation of ground in island cities from the perspective of
theories at the intersection of the land and the sea in order to propose a socially and politically
nuanced understanding of land reclamation. In the process, we have seen that land
reclamation represents not just a claiming of territory for private interests but a claiming of
territory that is difficult for the public to contest and that steers clear of what could ultimately
have been socially productive urban contention.
It would be wrong to state that land reclamation is the worst imaginable form of urban
development, even if it is uniquely problematic in the sense that it is problematic in a unique
way. It is, after all, possible for the corporate and the public good to dovetail: Residential
island development in Copenhagens Sydhavn has negatively affected low-income traditional
waterfront users (whose population was already dwindling due to wider gentrification
processes); however, it has also privileged the creation of centrally located middle-class
housing over use of the waterfront by relatively high-income boat owners, and this residential
area is utilised as leisure space by the public. Sometimes, island land is reclaimed or
repurposed with explicitly public aims, resulting in the creation of public parks or facilities,
as is the case with Xiamens Yundang Lake and Singapores Pulau Semakau. Even this,
however, can be problematic, for city authorities may be tempted to deploy the symbolic
power of island status to create themed spaces of innovative leisure, business, or
environmental use which can potentially relieve social tensions yet fail to solve underlying
power imbalances, poor standards of living, and environmentally destructive activities. The
flipside to the argument that iconically private spaces can be perceived as more damaging
than they really are (Paddison & Sharp, 2007) is that iconically public spaces can appear
more beneficial than they really are (Grydehj, 2014b: 186-187).
This has disturbing implications for the role of public space in what are, by any assessment,
some of the most economically and politically significant cities in the world. In many island
cities, space has needed to be constructed before it could be claimed for the public. The
public, as an abstract entity, is perfectly capable of constructing communities and even of
manufacturing ground, but in practice, land reclamation has often been led by highly
organised societal forces (business, political, or military actors). This is not only because land
reclamation is labour intensive and resource intensive but also because of the emergence of
a set of interlinked legal frameworks setting forth what state, private, and corporate actors
can and cannot do on or with urban space (Hudson, 1996: 65-79). Gone are the days when
Hong Kong property owners could expand the waterfront out into the sea of their own accord
(Ng, 2010). Informal, illegal, or extra-legal land reclamation does occur and can be carried
out by individuals and communities (e.g. Pigou-Dennis & Grydehj, 2014) or corporate actors
(e.g. Li, 2012), but it may be the corporate actors which are most capable of managing or
keeping a step ahead of the legal consequences.
If the public is excluded from recently reclaimed space, it is not necessarily because powerful
interests have pushed the public out but could just as easily be because the public never had
any foothold there to begin with. The situation is more complex with regard to older reclaimed
land, which may have become public space through custom or through law. Yet if the average
city dweller cannot tell the difference between natural ground and recently or historically
reclaimed ground, how is he or she to evaluate his or her claim to any particular piece of
urban space? Furthermore, even in circumstances in which land has not been stolen from
the poor for the benefit of rich, does not the claiming and territorialisation of new urban
space in the name of the already empowered represent a relative loss on behalf of those who
lack power and status? Does it not cede future cities to those with the finances to undertake
land grabs? Do not the calls for liquid, archipelagic, or aquapelagic understandings of society
precisely require that we remain vigilant against processes that dispossess the public of that
which it was unaware it possessed?
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Stephen Graham for providing inspiration; anonymous peer reviewers for
their input and criticism; and Godfrey Baldacchino, Philip Hayward, Naciye Doratl,andMay
Joseph for their advice at various stages in this papers formulation. Any failings remain my own.
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Making Ground, Losing Space: Land

Reclamation and Urban Public Space in

Keywords: Accumulation by dispossession; island cities; land reclamation; public space;

2015 Adam Grydehj

Island Dynamics, Denmark - http://www.urbanislandstudies.org

Making Ground, Losing Space: Land Reclamation and Urban Public

1. Theorising between land and sea

Noting the self-imposed terrestrial limitations of much geographical scholarship, Steinberg

2. Land reclamation in island cities

The Copenhagen archipelago is an instructive case. Copenhagens castle island, Slotsholmen,

Figure 1: Map of Copenhagen, mid-19th Century. Source:

3. Grounding public space

Although public space is conceptually problematic, it can nevertheless prove a worthwhile

Land has historically been a determinant of power and possesses a political-economic

4. The capture of unclaimed space

Precisely because it is so costly and time-consuming to manufacture ground, land reclamation

This represents a wicked twist on Harveys accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003).

3. Baldacchino. G. (2010) Island Enclaves: Offshoring Strategies, Creative Governance, and

4. Baldacchino, G. (2008) Studying Islands: On whose Terms? Some Epistemological and

6. Baldacchino, G. (2005) Editorial: IslandsObjects of Representation, Geografiska

8. By & Havn (n.d.)Land reclamation. Available at:

15. Durrat Al Bahrain (2013) Durrat Al Bahrain. Available at:

18. Funtasy Island (2014) Funtasy Island. Available at:

30. Heggland, N.O. (2014) Nye milliardbyggerier p vej i Sydhavnen, Berlinske, 18

34. Krrholm, M. (2007) The Materiality of Territorial Production: A Conceptual Discussion

49. Rubow, C. (2014) Nordhavn, Mere i mellem, 05 May. Available at:

56. Stratford, E., G. Baldacchino, E. McMahon, C. Farbotko, & A. Harwood (2011)

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